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The Other Side of the Sprint Vs. Cogent Depeering
Swoolley writes "A month back this community discussed the Sprint vs. Cogent depeering. Now a story I wrote for Forbes.com tells the inside story of the fight, based on the lawsuits the two companies filed against each other in Virginia state court. For once, thanks to those suits, the public gets to see the details of a confidential peering agreement between two of the Internet's largest autonomous systems, as well as the circumstances leading up to the depeering. (Which company is in the right? Read the facts and decide for yourself.) While some people have argued that the depeering is reason for more government regulation, the Forbes story makes the case that details of the recent Cogent vs. Sprint fight argue for exactly the opposite: keeping the Internet backbones free of government meddling."
Is anyone else here tired of knee-jerk partisanship framing discussion in terms of false dichotomies? Government involvement can do a whole lot of good or a whole lot of bad. The devil is always in the details.
Good: regulate to prevent monopolization of last-mile utilities and reduce barriers to competition.
Bad: let lobbyists who supported your campaign write bills that hand out huge billion dollar tax breaks to carriers to build out the next generation "information superhighway" and sit idle while all of that money goes straight into the pockets of shareholders instead while countries like South Korea and Japani take the lead in broadband while America slowly turns into a broadband backwater.
Hopefully things will work out a little differently in the new administration.
TurnKey Linux: if it can be easy, it should be easy
I don't know what others have been suggesting for regulation, but I would strongly support two simple regulations on depeering. 1) Provider A must give provider B at least X days notice of intent to depeer (say 180 days) 2) If some agreement isn't reached between provider A and provider B, both providers must notify all thier customers of the planned depeering giving thier customers at least X days notice (say 90) Nothing too invasive, just some basic comsumer protections.
"reality has a well-known liberal bias" - Steven Colbert
This is not the first time Cogent act like bandits.
http://gigaom.com/2008/03/18/cogent-ceo-peering-breakdown-is-telias-fault/
Looking at the tags for this story (and many others), it seems tags are being used more for comments on the story than as a useful means to group stories by tag. For instance here we have the tags 'corporatewhining' and 'fuckemboth', both of which are most definitely a comment on the story, not a useful tag as such, well, not very useful as comment either, truth be told.
For that matter, the more useless a tag, the more likely it is to be of a derogatory nature.
That's pretty broken really, not even slightly useful as a feature.
Perhaps there should be a list from which people select, such as there is when submitting stories
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
I find smoking pot to be a much better treatment for an alcohol induced hangover. How this relates to the GPs analogy is not immediately clear.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
You might be able to drink away a hangover, but it's just going to result in a worse hangover later.
Not necessarily.
I'm not saying it's better than a hangover, but at least you can honestly say it isn't a hangover.
Welcome to the Panopticon. Used to be a prison, now it's your home.
Cogent argue that under the terms of the contract they passed. They kept the link open at their end because as far as they were concerned they had passed and Sprint was simply following its end of the bargain. They're arguing that they don't have to pay because if Sprint really didn't think they had passed, they could have severed the link at their end.
The confusion is because both sides measured the performance in different ways. From Sprints' complaint:
Cogent unreasonably claimed that the amount of interconnection traffic satisfied the
utilization threshold requirement in the Trial Agreement because the port utilization peak figures
for each of the ten ports (used to calculate billing) exceeded the average utilization criteria across
all ports. Cogent ignored that Paragraph 5.E. required a sustained threshold average utilization
across all ports for the entire period, and instead focused on snapshot figures based on the
commercial pricing model of peak usage. As a result, Cogent argued that it was entitled to
settlement-free peering with Sprint.
I find it hard to believe that Cogent walked away from negotiations with the wrong idea about how the test was going to be measured. In any business negotiations both sides go to great pains to make sure everyone understands what's being agreed because otherwise it winds up in court like this. If the judge takes the view that Cogent was mislead (deliberate or not) then this becomes a big PITA for Sprint.
So yea, a balls-up for both parties.
Nick
You can't spend your way out of a bad economic cycle; that's like drinking more beer as a solution to a hangover.
While we're on analogies: Government stimulus packages don't - because the money they hand out has to come from somewhere. That somewhere is either additional money they tax away (typically from the most productive - the ones they were trying to "stimulate") or by "printing" (or equivalent) new money which gets its value by pulling value out of the money already out there. And the government handling of this money has costs. The stimulus is always less than the stifling.
So government "economic stimulus" is like trying to lengthen a blanked by cutting a strip off one end and sewing it onto the other. The blanket not only ends up no longer, but even a bit shorter.
(If not for that loss it would be like daylight savings time. B-) )
For more on this see the broken window falacy.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
Shameless self promotion: This article at Ars Technica explains how peering and transit works. For some more info see my blog: Internet Thought.
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If you just put a pile of money out in the street, sure, nothing will change, but your analogies are just that. History and reality are better barometers of effective policy.
If the government employs people to improve infrastructure, it lowers the cost of doing business and benefits the whole economy, while evening out the down cycle when other businesses are cutting back. The biggest reasons western countries do well as economies are their workers and their infrastructure and their reliance on government technology and protectionism. While America unfortunately does not see the benefit of having a well educated populace, it does see the benefit of having a reliable power grid, sewage system, telecommunications network, etc. Some societies see single payer health care as part of infrastructure, which is the main reason it's cheaper to build a car in Canada than it is in Detroit.
(Here's an article that discusses two facts unknown to most Americans: our car companies employ more people in Ontario than Michigan, and they do it because of their more efficient health care system and the canadian dollar.)
In fact, the computer you're typing on and the internet it travels over are all due to government research. Do you imagine we would be less prosperous if China had been the ones who were licensing technology for us to manufacture instead of the other way around? Government is capable of doing good things, but not in the hands of those who attend to the needs of corporations instead of people.